There was a fair number of “sites with funny videos” in the time of Windows For Workgroups – most were MPEG-1 compressed, and very short. They took a while to download. Many had no sound.

But yeah, the alternate reality part here is that nobody would have wanted to host too many videos, or have them become to popular. It would have been (and still is pretty close to being) way too expensive.

Stupid. In 1991 when I was a freshman at Berkeley, Apple demoed a beta of Quicktime to the Berkeley Mac Users Group that met on campus. Microsoft had fired up their photocopiers and shipped AVI not much later in 1992. Oh and I remember downloading the initial release of the Mozilla browser that year too. So, um, yah. No one was FLVing the web for the majority of the 90s. And yah, while the first half of the decade had slow access speeds, by the middle it was much better…especially if you were on campus or had a J-O-B (something today’s college graduates are probably unfamiliar with…thank you’re parents and grandparents for the Republican economic policy, kiddies). Nice try though.

You might be right about downloading a web browser in 1992 but it wasn’t Mozilla, it was likely Mosaic the precursor to Netscape Navigator which wasn’t around until 1994. Though according to Wikipedia, the initial release of Mosaic was not until 1993.

Version 1 of NCSA Mosaic (yes, I typoed like an idiot) may have been officially released in 1993. But I…and other folks…were using Mosaic before then. Even in the 90s Internet software was released in beta form. If you read the full Wikipedia article, you’ll find that development started in ’92, and there were versions before 1.0.